I just tried out the SuSE LiveEval cd to see what "the competition" are up to. And I have to say - I don't get it. My Law-student girlfriend can sit down at my Gnome desktop and get to the applications she wants, but I, a CS student, can not easily find my way around KDE in SuSE

There are still loads of kisms which means that you have to run every application to see what it does. There is also loads of duplication of function and loads of little things that make the apps feel like they were thrown together and not maticulously designed.